I have thoughts on the iPhone Air

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I have thoughts on the iPhone Air

July 7, 2026

Hard to believe, but it’s been over 9 months since the current crop of iPhones came out, and I elected to grab the (apparently not super popular) iPhone Air, a new model of iPhone introduced for the first time. Rumor season for the new iPhones is in full swing, so it seemed like a good time to jot down my thoughts on the current model.

Immediately, it’s really something to behold when you pick it up for the first time, it feels weirdly thin, pretty much everyone I’ve showed it to has been like “whoa”. You sacrifice a fair bit to get to that, from cameras to battery life, but I’ve always been a sucker for something novel, so when something as huge as the iPhone had a quirky new model I was really stoked to check it out.

Heck, part of my frame of mind was that this device is going to have some serious limitations, which will probably also apply to the rumored upcoming folding iPhone which I also really want to check out, so it’ll almost be a warmup round to get me in the right headspace for a folding iPhone. I think that makes sense?

Either way, over the last 9 months it’s been my primary phone day in and day out, and I wanted to jot down my thoughts on what it’s like to live with as someone who normally goes with the Pro phones, because there’s been some surprises.

The design

Picking up an iPhone Air for the first time is almost weird. Phones have had such a consistent slab design for so long that making it so, so dramatically thinner almost confuses your brain a little bit, like it’s an illusion or something. Forget putting a case on it, live with the danger.

My favorite example was handing my phone to an employee at a local store to show her a product I was looking for, I could see kind of a confused look when I handed it to her followed by a “your phone is so thin”, almost like she thought there was something wrong with it.

But, here’s my hot take. After the better part of a year it no longer feels thin, it just feels normal. Sure, when I pick up an older iPhone I’m lke “whoa this is so thick it feels like a relic”, but the Air doesn’t really feel noteworthy to me anymore. It’s like if you live in a cinnamon factory, I assume day one you’d be like “this is the best smelling place ever” but after a few months you’d go nose blind to it.

My cat wouldn't even give the Air a chance, clearly a Pro phone fanboy

That gives me pause, because it kinda makes me wonder that if any reasonably thin phone just feels normal after awhile, is it worth a bunch of compromises just to get it even thinner, when even that thinness feels normal eventually? I kinda feel like I thought about the thinness of my Pro iPhone the same amount after 9 months as I do now with the Air (which is to say, not really at all) but had a less compromised phone to show for it.

And it’s weird, because with the old wedge-style MacBook Airs this feeling never went away for me, I loved those machines and every time I picked it up I kinda marveled, but that sensation kinda just went away with the iPhone Air, perhaps since I’m picking it up so much more than a laptop?

The screen

I’ve always been a normal-sized phone guy. The Plus/Max phones just feel unwieldy, but I do admit whenever I hold one I’m like “dang… maybe…”.

The iPhone Air is the perfect solution to this, its screen size sits right in the middle of the normal Pro and Pro Max sized phones, and is one of my favorite parts of the phone.

It’s large without feeling unwieldy (so awesome for games and videos), typing is a joy on the increased size, and it really makes me wish this size was the normal “small” Pro phone. Apple could then make the Pro Max phone 8" diagonal or something, I wanna test how far these Pro Max people will go.

As a bonus my iPhone Pro can’t fit one of those tiny Xteink readers on the back, but my Air can perfectly!

The cameras

Camera quality feels as good as ever, it’s apparently not as good a main sensor as the Pro iPhones but I can’t really tell. It still has that distinctly over-processed look plaguing modern smartphones, but using an app like Project Indigo or Halide really helps here as they have modes that heavily reduce this distinct “phone” look.

The real issue is that there’s only one sensor. I didn’t think I’d mind that much but unfortunately it turns out I do.

On one hand, the iPhone’s main sensor has worse minimum focus distance than some Android phones, which means if you’re trying to take a photo of a document or something it often ends up blurry, you have to pull back a little bit then crop in after the fact. Since the...